Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
